http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/lazare
God's Willing Executioners
by DANIEL LAZARE
[from the December 11, 2006 issue]
There are many ways to describe Pope Benedict
XVI's remarks at the University of Regensburg
last September concerning the "evil and inhuman"
nature of Muhammad's teachings. Impolitic is one
way, maladroit another. They can also be
described as deeply ignorant concerning Islam's
role in preserving, transmitting and enhancing
classical culture at a time when most Europeans
were still snuggling up to their oxen for warmth.
But the most striking thing about the comments
was the way they reflected a view that was
alarmingly one-sided and unreflective. The
religious zeal of the proto-Muslim forces that
erupted out of Arabia in the seventh century has
been much exaggerated on both sides of the
Muslim-Christian divide. Far from forcing
subjects to adopt their faith (which at that
point was no more than embryonic), they
discouraged conversion if only because it would
have undermined the poll tax on Jews and
Christians on which their revenue depended. But
the religious zeal of Catholic armies that have
periodically erupted out of Western Europe has
not been exaggerated. Beginning with Charlemagne,
who is said to have beheaded 4,500 Saxons for the
crime of lapsing into paganism, they repeatedly
engaged in conversion by the sword along with
mass murder of all those who refused. If forced
conversion is "contrary to God's nature," as the
Pope asserted at Regensburg, then no institution
has behaved in a more ungodly fashion than his own church.
On the other hand, considering that Exodus 15:3
plainly states that "Yahweh is a warrior" and
that slaughtering unbelievers is one of the
things that warrior-god worshipers do, perhaps no
institution has behaved in a more godly fashion
either. Were it not for the fact that he has been
working on it since at least 1998, Christopher
Tyerman's massive new history of the Crusades
could be read as a rejoinder to the Benedictine
doctrine that forced conversion is something the
other side practices, never our own. Rather than
beginning with Charlemagne, God's War opens a
couple of centuries later, when, following an
extended period of punishment at the hands of
Viking, Magyar and Saracen raiders, the Catholic
West turned the tables on its tormenters and
began striking back with startling vigor. In
1015-16, Pisan and Genoese raiders were attacking
Arab pirate bases in Sardinia. A few decades
after that, Christian rulers in the north of
Spain were hitting back at Muslim rulers to the
south. By 1060 Norman adventurers were
campaigning to take Sicily from the Arabs, who
had taken it two centuries earlier from the
Byzantines. Then, in 1095, came the climax, an
immense human tide that poured out of France,
Flanders and other provinces and began making its
way east with the purpose of liberating, so to
speak, the Holy Land from the Seljuk Turks.
This was the opening salvo in the Crusades, a
century and a quarter of invasions and assaults
not only against Palestine but Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria and even Constantinople, the Byzantine
capital that was the Latin West's supposed ally.
Tyerman does not limit his account to those
expeditions, however, but also throws in the
Albigensian crusade of 1209-29 against a
heretical group of "dualists" in the South of
France known as the Cathars; the campaigns by
Teutonic Knights against pagan tribes in the
eastern Baltic; and the Christian reconquest of
Spain, which was largely complete with the fall
of Seville in 1248 even though a Muslim outpost
in Granada managed to hold on until 1492.
All were of a piece, which is to say that all
flowed from a Western resurgence that had its
first stirrings in the tenth century and had
reached high gear by the late eleventh. Two
things about this resurgence stand out. One is
its multidimensionality. Weak, depopulated and
culturally impoverished, Western Europe was on
everyone's list as the most unlikely candidate
for resurgence. Yet it was soon racing ahead not
just militarily but religiously, politically,
economically and even intellectually. The
Parisian student of dialectics was one aspect of
the Western European takeoff, the powerful growth
of shipping and trade was another, while the
crusading knight and the fiery cleric
proclaiming, "Kill them. The Lord knows who are
his own"--as the Abbot Arnaud Aimery reportedly
did in urging on the indiscriminate slaughter of
the people of Béziers, a Cathari stronghold--were
a third. All were products of an increasingly
aggressive and energetic society bent on
strengthening politico-religious authority at
home and extending its reach abroad.
The other thing that stands out about this
small-r renaissance is its roughness and
brutality. The elegant Byzantine court was
appalled by the barbaric hordes that landed on
its doorstep at the tail end of the eleventh
century. Anna Comnena, daughter of Emperor
Alexius I, was contemptuous of Norman soldiers
who "ravaged the outskirts of Nicaea"--located
across the Sea of Marmara from
Constantinople--"acting with horrible cruelty to
the whole population." Not only were these
Catholic brutes greedy, arrogant and hotheaded,
she wrote, but even their battlefield skills were
overrated. They were "indomitable in the opening
cavalry charge," but "afterwards, because of the
weight of their armor and their own passionate
nature and recklessness, it is actually very easy to beat them."
Still, barbaric enthusiasm carried the Crusaders
a long way. Although (or perhaps because) they
were headstrong and impulsive, their military
exploits, at the outset at least, were little
short of astounding. Traveling some 2,000 miles
from their home base, they quickly adapted to the
unfamiliar terrain and novel tactics they
encountered on crossing into Seljuk territory.
They mastered the fighting march and learned to
counter the rapid attack, feint and ambush that
were standard in the Middle East. Anna Comnena
was right about at least one thing, moreover:
Provided he kept his seat, the Western mounted
knight was well-nigh invincible. He was the
armored tank of the day, "maneuverable [and]
impervious to most of the fire power available to
the opposing infantry," as Tyerman puts it.
"Mounted on increasingly well-bred, specially
trained and larger horses, protected by armor and
wielding heavy lances, maces and swords, a few
knights could hold their own against scores of
infantry. The repeated accounts of seemingly
miraculous victories or escapes by hopelessly
outnumbered bands of knights, while likely to be
exaggerated, preserved a truth."
Staggering from the heat and thirst, the
chevaliers and their followers fought their way
across Anatolia and then somehow marshaled the
resources to mount an eight-month siege of the
city of Antioch in what is now southern Turkey.
Buoyed by the supposed discovery of the Holy
Lance that had pierced Christ's side--in reality
a piece of metal dug up from beneath the floor of
an Antiochene cathedral--the exhausted Crusaders
then turned around and defeated a far larger
Turkish force sent to relieve the city in June
1098. They celebrated their triumph in good
Christian fashion by slaughtering every Muslim
male within reach and driving lances into the bellies of the women as well.
But Antioch was merely a warm-up. Making their
way down the coast of present-day Syria, Lebanon
and Israel, the Crusaders turned inland at the
town of Arsuf, a few miles north of Jaffa, and
headed for Jerusalem. After setting up camp, they
proclaimed a three-day fast and, led by a priest,
marched barefoot around the city in imitation of
Joshua at the battle of Jericho. Once the
fighting began on June 13, 1099, they used mobile
siege towers constructed by Genoese engineers to
edge closer and closer to the city walls. After a
month of dodging arrows and bolts, they finally
got near enough to throw down planks and leap
across. Swarming down the ramparts, they
overwhelmed the city's Jewish and Muslim
defenders. "The scale of the slaughter," writes
Tyerman, "impressed even hardened veterans of the
campaign, who recalled the area [around the
Temple Mount] 'streaming with blood' that reached
to the killers' ankles." Jews who fled into a
synagogue were set ablaze, while "Muslims were
indiscriminately cut to pieces, decapitated or
slowly tortured by fire." A few days later, the
Crusaders ordered Muslim survivors to remove the
dead bodies clogging the narrow streets and carry
them outside to be burned. When the Muslims had
done as they were told, the Christians massacred
them as well. On July 15, 1099, the victors
gathered in a local church to give thanks for
their triumph. "With the fall of the city," one
participant noted, "it was rewarding to see the
worship of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulcher,
the clapping of hands, the rejoicing and singing
of a new song to the Lord. Their souls offered to
the victorious and triumphant God prayers of
praise which they could not express in words."
Turning the other cheek this was not. But,
contrary to a long tradition of romanticizing the
Other, Tyerman argues that the slaughter in
Jerusalem was consistent with the prevailing
regional standard. "The recent Turkish conquests
in the Near East had been accompanied by carnage
and enslavement on a grand scale," he observes.
"When it suited, Muslim victors could behave as
bestially as any Christian." A Jewish observer
noted that, unlike Muslims, Christians at least
did not rape enemy women before killing them. On
the other hand, there was nothing in the Islamic
camp that quite compared with what God's War
describes as "a daredevil but starving group" of
Christian warriors known as the Tafurs, who not
only killed their Muslim opponents but reportedly ate them, too.
One side engaged in mass rape, while the other
preferred a dash of cannibalism to liven things
up. Despite wading through blood, both others'
and their own, the Crusaders were able to
maintain a grip on Jerusalem a scant eighty-eight
years before being dislodged by a Kurdish warlord
named Saladin (who, according to Tyerman, does
not quite merit the accolades heaped upon him by
Western xenophiles). Decades of economic decline
followed in the Crusaders' remaining territories
up and down the coast. With it came deepening
disorder marked by, among other things, a vicious
civil war that erupted in 1256 between Venetians,
Pisans, Provençals, Templars and Teutonic Knights
on one side and Genoese, Hospitallers and
Catalans on the other. Peace was mostly restored
in 1258, but then Crusader possessions began
toppling under growing Muslim pressure--Jaffa in
1268, followed by Tripoli in 1289 and then, in
one fell swoop, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut,
Tortosa and Athlit in 1291. Western knights
continued to gain ground in Spain and Portugal.
They created a short-lived Latin republic in
Constantinople in 1204, while participating a
century later in lavish campaigns against
Prussian, Livonian and Lithuanian pagans
complete, according to Tyerman, with "special
feasts, displays of heraldry, souvenirs and even
prizes." Yet in the eastern Mediterranean, they
clearly overshot themselves, traveling too far to
wrest too little from an enemy that ultimately proved too strong.
What did it all add up to? Not much, according to
Francis Bacon, who jeered at the Crusades as a
"rendezvous of cracked brains that wore their
feather in their head instead of their hat."
David Hume agreed, calling the campaign to take
back the Holy Land "the most signal and most
durable monument of human folly that has yet
appeared in any age or nation." Despite efforts
by economic determinists to describe the Crusades
as a trade war in religious guise, the French
medievalist Jacques Le Goff once wisecracked that
the sole economic benefit to derive from them was
the introduction of the apricot. In fact,
according to Tyerman, Westerners did not need the
Crusades to insinuate themselves into the
economic life of the eastern Mediterranean; the
region, he writes, was "crawling" with Western
pilgrims, mercenaries, merchants and pirates
before they even began. There is simply no
evidence that the Western economic position was
any stronger than it would otherwise have been.
So what is the explanation? The Crusades should
be understood not as a clash between two systems
but as the product of a Christian-Islamic system
from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf that was by
turns competitive and symbiotic. The two halves
of this system thrusted and parried, advanced and
withdrew, but also borrowed from each other,
traded and stole. Inter alia, they used the
extended warfare between them to reorganize
themselves politically. Both underwent a process
of convergence as those at the top tightened the
controls and marshaled social resources. European
society grew increasingly uniform from one end of
the continent to the other with the result,
according to Fernand Braudel, that a traveler
would feel "as much at home in Lübeck as in
Paris, in London as in Bruges, in Cologne as in
Burgos, Milan, or Venice. Moral, religious and
cultural values, and the rules of war, love, life
and death were the same everywhere, from one tier
to another, whatever their quarrels, their
revolts or their conflicts." Similarly, growing
Turkish hegemony in the Middle East led to the
imposition of a Sunni orthodoxy that was just as
uniform. In the West, the popes had tried to
solve the problem of endemic warfare among the
nobility by "externalizing" it onto the Muslims.
In the East, Islamic rulers also had to put a
stop to endemic infighting before dealing with
Turkish freebooters known as the Khwarazmians,
and they checked the Mongols at the Battle of
Homs in 1281 before finishing off the remaining
Crusaders. By the fourteenth century, they were
ready to turn the table on the Christians and
begin marching up the Balkans under Ottoman leadership.
God's War is a long but highly readable account
of this extensive back-and-forth struggle. It is
an impressive achievement, a work that manages to
tie together an extraordinary number of threads
across nearly half a millennium of European
history. Although it can be taken as a response
to Pope Benedict XVI's comments at Regensburg, it
is more properly read as an extended rejoinder to
Steven Runciman's classic three-volume History of
the Crusades, published in the early 1950s, a
long and colorful account that is nonetheless
studded with judgments that now seem prejudiced
and amateurish. Tyerman, by contrast, is never
amateurish. His knowledge of the period is
encyclopedic, and his judgments are sharp, astute
and fair--which is to say unsparing--to both
camps. He neither vilifies Islam nor engages in
the easy Euro-bashing that is the obverse of
Islamophobia. With so many people succumbing to
subjectivism these days, it is bracing to come
across a historian who remains resolutely above
the fray, who insists on viewing the conflict as
a whole and who always has the broader context in mind.
Not that God's War is entirely free of faults.
The writing is clear, although on one or two
occasions it gets bogged down in details. More
significant is the near absence of anything by
way of a social or economic dimension. Tyerman
tells us little about what it was about Western
Europe that enabled it to project so much force
at so great a distance. The Third Crusade,
launched in 1189, for instance, was heavily
dependent on sea transport, and although Tyerman
informs us that "the variety of vessels
available, the certainty of planning and routes,
the awareness of naval logistics, the distances
covered and the accurate predictions of timing
reflected the exponential growth in maritime
activity and exchange around the coasts of Europe
in the twelfth century," he doesn't say where
this exponential growth came from or what
socioeconomic innovations allowed it to occur. He
is silent about the uniquely European blend of
fragmentation and cohesion that led to endless
political infighting but also to the formation of
highly effective fighting orders such as the
Templars and Hospitallers. Thanks to an emerging
body of corporate law that granted a high degree
of autonomy and self-governance to such groups,
Europe was able to create new sources of economic
and political power that other societies over the long haul could not match.
The same goes for economic productivity, the
ultimate reason for all those bigger knights,
bigger horses and weightier armor--Tyerman tells
us nothing about that either. His discussion of
the evolution of the Christian doctrine of holy
war similarly stops short. The problem,
admittedly, is a difficult one. Despite the
pacific tone of the Gospels, the Christian
society that emerged in the Latin West, as
historian William McNeill once noted, was the
most heavily militarized on earth, with the
possible exception of shogun Japan. Indeed, God's
War recounts the tale of the abbot of St. Germain
during the Viking siege of Paris in 885-86 who,
rather than loving his enemies, was said to be
"capable of piercing seven men with a single
arrow [and] in jest he commanded some of them to
be taken to the kitchen." Tyerman trots out the
usual suspects in explaining where this sort of
Christian bloodlust came from--not only the
compromises that church fathers made with state
power following the conversion of Constantine in
the early fourth century but also the sacred
texts that seem to urge more and more, such as
the Book of Revelation, with its vision of a
world drowning in blood, and the Old Testament
tales of murder and mayhem that make the Koran
seem positively Gandhian. He is quite correct in
all this, although he might have pointed out that
Christ had his militant side as well, one he
revealed when denouncing the rich, or proclaiming
that he had "not come to bring peace but a sword"
or, in an especially curious incident outside
Jerusalem, blasting a fig tree merely because he
was hungry and it was bare of fruit.
But even if Christ hadn't caused that fig tree to
wither, it wouldn't have mattered. Even at its
purest, Christian pacifism reflects a kind of
inward-directed violence that can all too easily
be turned in the opposite direction. Given
Christ's command that "if your right hand causes
you to sin, cut it off," what is a good Christian
to do with a sinner causing an entire community
to go astray? Excommunicate him or burn him at
the stake? Even more fundamental is the issue of
revelation itself. Revelation in the Western
monotheistic tradition is a form of divine
intervention in which the supreme being makes
himself known to ordinary mortals. Because such
visitations are miraculous and hence outside the
realm of nature, they can't be proven according
to the normal rules of evidence. Instead, they
must be taken on faith. What's more, because they
constitute the greatest events in history, belief
in them becomes the greatest of virtues while
disbelief becomes the basest of sins. For that
reason, the people in the next valley who believe
in a different revelation can't simply be ignored
or laughed off--they must be ruthlessly
suppressed, if not exterminated. Revelation, no
matter how benign, thus becomes the basis for ceaseless warfare.
This was the ideology at the heart of the
Crusades. Reason and evidence are forces for
convergence since they lead to conclusions on
which most thoughtful people can agree--that the
earth is round, for instance, that it circles the
sun, that E=mc² and so on. Faith, by contrast, is
a force for divergence--or, more precisely, a
force for convergence and divergence, as entire
societies are forced to believe in one "truth"
and then to launch a holy war against those
believing in another that is equally
unverifiable. In his talk at Regensburg, Pope
Benedict XVI complained about "reason which is
deaf to the divine." God's War is about what
happens when people are all too alert to voices
that no one else can hear and are all too
determined to carry out what they believe to be
those voices' instructions. The results were
appalling during the Crusades. It is even more
appalling that the same habits are now making a comeback.